{"id":1185,"date":"2009-05-03T21:51:33","date_gmt":"2009-05-04T02:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:37:21","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:37:21","slug":"revising-history-brief-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2009\/05\/revising-history-brief-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Revising history: Brief notes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Quick hits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s one of the most difficult periods of modern history to teach, and I love using primary sources for the tough times, so I&#8217;m always glad to see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/03\/08\/books\/review\/Hammer-t.htm\">new oral histories of the Maoist era<\/a>. In some ways, the flaws the reviewer cites &#8212; wandering in particular &#8212; could be really useful for students.<\/li>\n<li>A new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/04\/23\/AR2009042303315.html\">revisionist history of Chiang Kaishek<\/a> raises the possiblity of teaching 20th century China in a much more balanced and complete way. I&#8217;m not entirely convinced, though: the portrait of Chiang as a political visionary is still in great tension with his heavy-handed methods and questionable associates and administrative skills; the idea that Taiwan&#8217;s development was charted by Chiang has to contend with both the Japanese legacies and the favorable international environment for Taiwan&#8217;s economic development during the Cold War. I want to see some real academic reviews.<\/li>\n<li>The NYT &#8220;Room for Debate&#8221; about <a href=\"http:\/\/roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/02\/chinese-language-ever-evolving\/\">Chinese Character Simplification<\/a> would be a lot more interesting if they discussed anything other than the first-wave simplification carried out by the Communists &#8212; the association of language control with early empire, the natural evolution of languages (i.e. the instability of &#8220;traditional&#8221; characters), the realities of technology and language. I&#8217;ve read a couple of their &#8220;Room for Debate&#8221; pieces, and I don&#8217;t see the point.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quick hits: It&#8217;s one of the most difficult periods of modern history to teach, and I love using primary sources for the tough times, so I&#8217;m always glad to see new oral histories of the Maoist era. In some ways, the flaws the reviewer cites &#8212; wandering in particular &#8212; could be really useful for&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[96,165,106,119,126,141,161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-china","category-civil-war","category-english","category-general","category-maoist-era-1949-1976","category-taiwan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-j7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4687,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/4687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}